Social networks and personal networks are in principle two sides of the same coin. One sees the network from the point of view of “the masses” and the other from the point of view of the individual.

In the social web, the pendulum has swung back and forth over the last five years, from MySpace to blogs to Facebook to Twitter (and naturally the ubiquitous iPhone .

At the moment, partially due to mobile applications, development is tending away from the big social networks and more towards the smaller, personal helper apps which assist the user to link into their personal network and thus their circle of friends and acquaintances.

Interestingly, there haven’t been any corresponding developments in e-commerce in the past years. Here, the social shopping network has reigned from the beginning. What is missing (and in particular what we are waiting to see in some Facebook apps), are personal networking tools which are custom-tailored to the shopping addicted.

After the Etsy announcements (“How Social Can Commerce Get?”) it can be certainly assumed that e-commerce is catching up and tools and services for the personal shopping network will slowly develop.

Last year with Optaros, we introduced a Magento extension which pointed in this direction. In the meantime you can find independent services such as Quorus (not to be confused with the well hyped Quora), which we would like to report on sometime in the future. Quorus’ focus on the personal network opens up a new range of potential for the social shopping area.

Related posts:

• Etsy 2010: How Social Can Commerce Get?
• Magento Matters: Social Shopping with Facebook and Magento
• What Was and What Shall Be: The Rise of The Emotional Web

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.